from Hacker News

New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model

by gbaygon on 7/15/19, 3:49 PM with 188 comments

• by cgriswald on 7/15/19, 4:14 PM

  > Before you go and start casting aspersions at Apple, the move makes a lot of sense. It'd be one thing if it did this and raised the price, but it actually lowered the price by $100, and the education discount brings it down to $999, making it the most affordable modern MacBook laptop ever (the outdated MacBook Air does not count).

  Which is fine for the entry-level model. Is it true for the more expensive model? The article doesn't say.

  > With that as the background, Apple was bound to make a sacrifice or two to reached the aggressive price point and it did so with the SSD. Most people will take that over it removing something like Touch ID or another feature they'd use on a daily basis. It's also worth pointing out that given it is an entry-level point product, most users who pick up the new notebook likely won't notice the difference at all.

  I'm not sure that most people would, given the choice, have gone that route. There are plenty of Apple features (including Touch ID) that Apple thinks people want, but I'm not convinced that most people definitely want them. The last sentence is the only one that counts: most people won't notice.

• by mrpippy on 7/15/19, 5:32 PM

  It's worth remembering that the storage architecture of T2-based Macs (like this MacBook Air) is very different from previous Macs and any PCs.

  The T2 chip is an Apple ARM SoC running Darwin/XNU (basically a cut-down iOS). It connects to the Intel system using a variety of buses.

  From a storage perspective, the T2 is the storage controller. It sits between raw NAND flash and the Intel system (connecting to the Intel with PCIe/NVMe). The T2 transparently encrypts all data stored on the NAND, using the factory-burned-in key.

  Given this architecture, how would read speeds drop by 35% from one model to the next? I'm not sure--my first guess was that fewer NAND chips were being used, but teardowns show that both 2018 and 2019 models were using two chips. So same controller, same number of chips. Maybe the NAND is just slower? Or the T2 has less RAM, so it can cache less?

• by filleokus on 7/15/19, 4:27 PM

  I like fast SSD's as much as everyone else, but it's not like those disks are a slouch. 1.3 GB/s is still plenty fast, especially for those who are in the market for the Macbook Air.

  It's probably however the first time, I can remember at least, where Apple downgraded a newer model in such an unequivocal way.

  I mean newer CPU's have had different multicore/single core tradeoffs, the inclusion of a dedicated GPU have been removed in base models etc, and the endless discussion of ports (rip SD card slot etc) but I don't think we have ever seen something like this?

• by who_what_why on 7/15/19, 4:20 PM

  1.3 GB/s vs 2 GB/s read. I think it's perfectly reasonable given most users aren't going to be doing high I/O, and if they did, they'd just get a MBP.

• by rythie on 7/15/19, 4:36 PM

  It's still very fast. Less than 2 minutes to read the entire drive of the base model. It's more than twice as fast as any SATA SSD. Similar to 2017 Macbook Air for read speed and much better write [1]

  I'm sure for almost all users of those machines, the SSD is more than fast enough for everything they want and big upgrade from HDD based Windows laptops many will be switching from (those were typical 3-4 years ago and even now are still around).

  https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pc...

• by jerf on 7/15/19, 5:44 PM

  Is this even going to be noticeable at all out of benchmarks?

  Nominally, my personal system has something that can do 2GB/s, but in normal operation, as programs and OSes do their thing, the software is incapable of making requests quickly enough to come even close to saturating the bandwidth. I'm not sure if you dropped a part in there that maxed out at 512MB/s that I could even notice.

  Amdahl's law codifies the observation that as you get closer and closer to 0 time taken for a particular subtask, you'll rapidly stop gaining actual performance due to all the other subtasks that didn't speed up. It seems like 1GB/s is likely to be as close to infinite in practice as 2GB/s is.

• by uwuhn on 7/15/19, 4:08 PM

  I bought a new Macbook Air this weekend. I asked the sales associate who was helping me with my purchase why the new one was cheaper than the previous generation, which was still available in the store and being sold alongside the new ones.

  He told me it was because they had dropped the price point on the SSDs. I'm curious if they were actually briefed on why they're cheaper and what to respond with when asked, or if he actually didn't know why Apple reduced the price (cheaper/worse SSDs).

• by _ph_ on 7/15/19, 4:12 PM

  Apple might have chosen cheeper SSDs to lower prices - which in principle think is a good idea on the entry level laptop, even cheap SSDs are plenty fast - why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades? Current market prices for SSD are between 150 and 300€/tb. For SSD upgrades in the MB Air, Apple is charging 240€ for each upgrade step. That means prices between 1920€/tb (128->256g) and 480€/tb (512g->1t). Even the price for the last step would consider an extremely healthy margin, but what about the other steps? And let's not talk about the 240€ for the 8g memory upgrade.

• by cm2187 on 7/15/19, 4:19 PM

  Would be curious of whether this is before or after the cache. My understanding is that, for instance, newer Samsung QLC SSDs are slower but they include a very fast SLC cache, and in practice you spend your time in the cache unless you are copying >15GB files.

• by josteink on 7/15/19, 5:12 PM

  Are these new T2-based Macs usable with Linux yet?

  Honest question.

  Edit: For the downvoters, it’s a real concern: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/11/06/mac-t2chip-linux/

• by dexterdog on 7/15/19, 7:16 PM

  And in typical Apple fashion the price to get the SSD doubled from the laughingly small base of 128 to 256 ($188) is more than it would cost to but a drive 4 times that size.

• by olliej on 7/15/19, 4:14 PM

  I wonder if there’s improved life expectancy of slower SSDs? (Serious question, not Apple fanboying here, any change in life expectancy is presumably incidental to reduction in price point)

• by JustSomeNobody on 7/15/19, 4:20 PM

  Given most people who will buy and use this device will spend more time waiting on JavaScript to load than on the SSD, I would say it is correct to assert nobody will notice.

• by floatingatoll on 7/15/19, 10:32 PM

  What real-word “more often than once a year” use case for a MacBook Air is affected by this change, that would not also require the CPU and RAM resources of a MacBook Pro to deliver in a human-acceptable time?

  Compiling requires a Pro due to the cores, so I/O won’t be your restriction due to the busy cores, and the small size of files and memory-cached directory structures.

  Video encoding a 2-hour, 50GB Blu-Ray rip is restricted to the performance of the hwaccel available, which is guaranteed to be less than 1Gbps of input for any plausible output, and thus not I/O restricted either.

  Any file size under 200M will be unaffected since it can be read from disk in one clock second on either old or new.

  So, completely seriously, who will be using an Air and negatively impacted by this change, such that it’s newsworthy and frontpage-worthy?

  Certainly not the students it’s targeted towards — unless they’re in data sciences, in which case they’ll need 2 minutes to process an entire drive full of data instead of 1 minute, having somehow overcome CPU and RAM limitations to do so.

  I believe such cases are possible, but I’m having a hard time constructing plausible ones.

• by nazgulnarsil on 7/15/19, 9:47 PM

  Soldered on 128gb ssd. Expletives readily come to mind.

• by filmgirlcw on 7/15/19, 8:12 PM

  I think this is fine. As other have said, if the price hadn’t changed and this happened, that would be annoying (even though the typical MBA customer won’t notice), but since the price has decreased, this is a fair trade-off.

  Incidentally, I got my mom the 2018 Air (to replace her 2010 13” MacBook Pro) and she loves it and she LOVES Touch ID. She uses her iPad for most things but occasionally needs a full computer and it’s been great for her.

  If I had any reason for a <del>third</del> <del>fourth</del> fifth laptop (I do not), I’d consider one just as something to play on.

• by toomanybeersies on 7/16/19, 1:08 AM

  For the intended user of a MacBook Air this isn't an issue at all, neither is the lack of peripheral ports.

  Most people I know with MacBook Airs don't actually use any peripherals.

  On the other hand, I need 2 dongles and a USB SD card reader just to do my job with my 2018 MBP. I also need an external keyboard, which I never used to need, because it's literally painful to use the keyboard all day.

• by Mikeb85 on 7/15/19, 6:35 PM

  Honestly, SSD speeds barely matter for most workloads. For your typical task, everything gets loaded into RAM, so the user will notice what, a 40% increase in loading time once that session, and at 1.3gbps, that likely means half a second extra.

  Honestly, for a typical user, the typical amount of RAM and SSD speeds is more than enough.

• by Razengan on 7/15/19, 7:02 PM

  Yes. For a lower price than the 2018 model. Seems like manufactured outrage.

• by ryanmercer on 7/15/19, 4:38 PM

  I imagine the vast majority of customers will never notice the difference as not everyone is buying these things to monkey with code or large video files.

• by wwweston on 7/15/19, 5:34 PM

  Well, fortunately you can just swap it out with something faster if you don't like it.

  Wait, what's that? You can't? Oh. Well, if that matters to you, maybe you should buy a pro model that will let you customize components.

  What's that? Oh. Well, let's be honest, who really cares about this stuff anyway? If you want something different from what Apple is offering, you're really just not part of their market anyway.

• by catacombs on 7/15/19, 8:47 PM

  At this point, why bother buying a new MacBook?

• by ChuckNorris89 on 7/15/19, 4:10 PM

  Classic race to the bottom.

• by aurizon on 7/15/19, 11:59 PM

  The 'Apple way', soon we will sell you a 35% faster upgrade...

• by reilly3000 on 7/15/19, 4:15 PM

  It’s been real. After owning 6+ Mac laptops for the past 15 years I’m out.

• by wedn3sday on 7/15/19, 6:19 PM

  My philosophy has been for a long time that if you're doing anything thats even remotely taxing your laptop, you shouldnt be using a laptop for it.